CVE-2026-97530

A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's qla2xxx Fibre Channel driver, affecting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9, and 10 kernel and kernel-rt packages, Red Hat In-Vehicle OS kernels, and the OpenShift Container Platform RHEL CoreOS kernels. Red Hat rates the impact of this issue as LOW. When copying multi-IOCB responses, qla27xx_copy_multiple_pkt() and qla27xx_copy_fpin_pkt() polled the response ring for the RESPONSE_PROCESSED (0xDEADDEAD) signature at a byte offset that aliases with raw continuation IOCB frame payload data. An entity able to transmit frames on the attached Fibre Channel SAN can send a frame whose payload bytes at that offset equal 0xDEADDEAD, which the driver misinterprets as the continuation IOCB not yet having arrived, so the code spins indefinitely in interrupt/DPC context without advancing the ring. The result is a CPU soft lockup that renders the host unresponsive (denial of service); there is no impact on confidentiality or integrity. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Extended Lifecycle Support is not affected because the vulnerable code, introduced with the SAN congestion management implementation, is not present in that stream. Because this issue is rated LOW impact, fixes for the affected streams are deferred to future updates rather than shipped immediately; until a fix is released, systems whose Fibre Channel fabrics are accessible to untrusted entities remain at residual risk of a CPU soft lockup. The assigned CVSS:3.1 base score is 5.5 (Moderate), but Red Hat's overall impact rating is LOW because exploitation requires the ability to send crafted traffic on the adjacent Fibre Channel storage fabric rather than general network reachability.